Robbie Savage on the troubles at West Brom
IT’S a big worry for Alan Pardew that the curfew-breakers on West Brom’s ill-fated trip to Barcelona were senior players.
I’ve seen players sneak in and out of windows and tiptoe down fire escapes to avoid detection when they nip out past their bedtime.
It’s not a modern football curse. Even England’s World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore was punished by West Ham for an unauthorised nightcap in Blackpool when he was on FA Cup duty.
But when West Brom are bottom of the Premier League, seven points adrift of safety, and senior pros Gareth Barry, Jonny Evans, Jake Livermore and Boaz Myhill fail to observe a curfew, it points to a lack of respect for the manager.
And taking liberties behind the manager’s back is never a good sign when you are fighting relegation.
The first observation I would make is that Pardew chose a strange time to take his squad away on a ‘bonding’ trip.
There were only four days between West Brom’s 3-0 defeat at Chelsea on the Monday night and an FA Cup tie with Southampton the following Saturday. There was no international break.
Secondly, going abroad is no longer a case of getting away from it all, as the saying goes. If anything, you are under more scrutiny when you ‘fly the flag’ in a foreign country. And whatever shenanigans with a taxi were involved, the episode was always going to become public knowledge sooner or later.
Thirdly, Pardew should be alarmed that John Williams and Martin Goodman, instrumental in appointing him, were jettisoned by the club’s Chinese owner.
When managers are under pressure to deliver results, they need all the allies they can get in the boardroom.
And most of all, it’s a very bad sign when Pardew’s authority is undermined by senior players when West Brom have won only one of their 13 Premier League games under his rule.
I queried the logic behind sacking Tony Pulis, who has never been relegated as a manager, and the ‘Pardew effect’ has not been a roaring success.
Six of West Brom’s nine goals in the Premier League under Pardew have been from set-pieces, which was supposedly one of Pulis’s strong suits.
And they have scored the lowest number of goals from open play in the division – only three in 13 games since Pardew arrived, so he is wrestling with big problems on and off the pitch. As a player, I suppose the golden rule is this: If you’re going to break a curfew, don’t get caught. During my career, it was sometimes the brave thing to stay in the hotel instead of going along with the crowd who were heading out. I wasn’t always an angel, but at Blackburn I had too much respect for the manager Mark Hughes, who I had looked up to as a kid, to let him down. What happens to players who break the rules? It sometimes depends on their standing at the club. If you are a vital part of the team, the manager might have to treat you leniently instead of hammering you and rocking the boat. But West Brom are in such desperate trouble he cannot afford to bin four senior pros. It would be cutting off his nose to spite his face. I notice all four of West Brom’s socalled ‘Cab Four’ have been disciplined by the club, which was inevitable after they issued a public apology for their behaviour. But they were never going to be sacked – not when Livermore is a current England international and the Baggies were batting away big-money interest in Evans during the transfer window. Clubs don’t sack commodities worth £20million unless it’s the last resort. I don’t know Pardew and I wish him good luck in trying to steer West Brom away from the bottom of the table. But if they lose against Huddersfield today, that trip to Barcelona will have served no meaningful purpose and you will have to fear for him.